


paper cranes

by Larrant



Series: Bodhi & Galen works [3]
Category: Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel - James Luceno, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 13:38:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8892757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Larrant/pseuds/Larrant
Summary: Bodhi finds Galen folding a crane, once. It means something, somehow, and Bodhi never really forgets.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChangeTheCircumstances](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChangeTheCircumstances/gifts).



> Gifted and dedicated as well to everyone who read the other two works in this series :').

 

 

_“Please,” he begs, desperately, “It was my friend’s. Please.”_

_The woman looks at the thing, held so thin between her fingers. For a moment, Bodhi is terribly, terribly afraid she will open it up and rip it to shreds before his eyes._

_She reaches out a hand and fists it in his jumpsuit, pulling him close in a sudden and jarring motion- he bites back a yelp when his knee collides with the bars, bruising and painful. He squeezes his eyes shut, doesn’t want to look._

_And then he can feel the flap of his jumpsuit pocket being lifted, and when he’s unceremoniously dropped to the ground he finally opens his eyes, staring at the back of the woman who- has turned her back on him and is striding away. He’s being left in the cell, alone._

_The panic belies the underlying bewilderment, the vague confusion at the turn of events. His heart hammering, he looks down. The flap of his pocket is still up, and he reaches a hand inside, feels his breath hitch when he touches warm flaky paper._

_“Thank you,” he mumbles, not knowing whether he should be grateful or not to the woman who is already gone._

 

* * *

 

When they leave Eadu, that’s when he realizes. There’s Jyn, sitting in the corner, the Rebel officer and the others and then Kaytoo. But then he _looks_ and he realizes (a part of him is unsurprised, a part of him thinks he’s always known)- and he doesn’t see the person he’s desperately looking for, in that huddle of people.

 _Galen_ , he wants to ask, suddenly, _what happened to Galen_.

But he doesn’t. He sits there, quietly, and breathes in slow and even, and nothing on the ship changes. The quiet is almost peaceful.

And maybe he shouldn’t ask, not when Jyn sits there, closed and alone, staring at through everything and at nothing. There’s dirt streaked on her face, her hair is in disarray. He watches her for a moment, before his vision grows unfocused and he makes himself look away, look down at his hands.

Galen’s gone, he thinks, knows it to be true, and he won’t ever come back.

He wonders if he has a right to mourn. He wonders, and there’s something cold and empty that has settled in his heart, cold in his lungs and his veins and everything is cold- and maybe he just didn’t notice in the beginning.

That night, he sits in the main living area on the ship, shivering despite the several blankets he’d taken. There aren’t enough bunks for all of them, and Bodhi had wandered off to the centre of the ship, wedged himself between a tank and a crate where it seemed it might be warmest. In the quiet of the darkness, he touches the flap of his jumpsuit pocket and draws out a folded shape of paper. His fingers are gentle as he opens the thing, lets it sit on his palm.

His hand is shaking. He puts the shape back before he can stain it with the droplets of liquid falling from his cheek to the floor.

 

* * *

 

_“What are those?” He asks, looking at the square of paper in Galen’s hands. He watches as Galen smiles, but doesn’t speak or answer. It’s an indication from the scientist to stay and see, and so Bodhi does, pulls up a chair and watches with first curiousity and then avid attention as Galen folds the paper into ever smaller shapes, tries to memorize the motions without knowing what they’re for. It’s therapeutic almost, just watching Galen do it._

_Eventually, Galen twists the paper just so and when he opens his closed palm, Bodhi finds himself surprised by the shape of a bird that has taken form in Galen’s hand. It stands up by itself, wings outstretched and beak sharp- a moment ago there had been a flat piece of paper._

_“A paper crane,” Galen tells him, with a faint smile. He makes a little gesture, splays out his hand as if urging Bodhi to take the thing. Tentatively he does, lifts the thing with two fingers and watches it in the air, amazed by how small it is, how fragile the paper must be. It’s lovely, he thinks, and thinks it marvellos that something like this could be crafted by human hands from such a mundane, banal thing._

_His comm buzzes then, and Bodhi is startled- somehow doesn’t fumble with the crane or drop it. He winces when he sees who its from._

_Galen waves him off with a slight smirk, “Keep it, don’t be late.” Bodhi folds the crane on its side, finds out it flattens perfectly, and remembers to call a thank you before he’s completely out of the room._

 

* * *

 

“What are you doing?” A woman- one of the Rebellion’s pilots- looks over at him as he folds a crane. He’s sitting on a crate, trying to find something to do with his hands while he waits for the others.

Bodhi blinks, looking up. He’s meticulously torn a scrap piece of paper into a square, and even though this was maybe not the time to be sitting around idle, well, it wasn’t like Bodhi had a job here. He’s just waiting.

He just about finishes the crane in time for it to be his reply to her. He shows the thing to the woman, whose eyes widen and who laughs in delight. She beckons for him to hand it to her, and he feels oddly proud of himself watching her handle it.

“This is brilliant,” she looks at it closer, gentle with the thing as she flips it between her fingers. She pauses, looks up at him, “Hey, think you could teach me?”

Bodhi blinks again. “Of course,” he replies without thinking about it, and then closes his mouth, surprised by himself. But he teaches her, because he has the time, and he’s never shown this to anyone else apart from Galen, so he thinks he wants to.

He’s not sure how much time he spends with her there, just sitting on crates and showing her how to fold a crane, how to tear the paper to make a perfect square and then fold it just so that all the corners meet. She claps after he finishes his second one, and he finds himself applauding as well when she finishes her first crane. It’s a little raggedy and bent a bit at the corner, but it gives him a strange sense of pride, a strange sense of fulfilment.

He’s completely forgotten about the time, by the time the holocomm Andor had given him buzzes and he picks it up without a thought, only to hear a- “ _get over here, they’re not gonna wait for you_ ”, and he almost fumbles with it shutting it back off. Oops.

Looking towards the pilot for confirmation, the woman is already smiling, understandingly, “Don’t keep your friend waiting.”

“I’ll try,” he says, standing up- he thinks it’s fine to just leave the cranes there, maybe someone else will pick them up.

“I’m Shara,” the woman calls after him. “The Force be with you!”

He looks back and nods, thinks back to where he’s heard those words before and replies with a- “And with you!” and then he’s gone, swerving past droids and mechanics in his haste to get back to the others.

He remembers afterwards- she had told him her name, and she had completely forgotten to tell her his. Well, he thinks, he might just have the chance to find her again and tell her after.

 

* * *

 

_He doesn’t find himself with the time to seek out Galen again, not for the next few days. But when he’s back on his ship, back in the comfort of space, he finds himself taking the paper crane back out and peering at it under the light of the overhead lamps._

_He studies it awhile, never unfolds it, never takes it apart. Just studies it._

_There’s a stack of paper somewhere in a crate- he remembers that, it had been unclaimed cargo, and he’d kept it around for no good reason. After two years it seems like it was finally going to be of some use._

_It’s hard, experimenting with folding paper into the shape of that crane without ever taking the crane apart to see how it had been folded. But he has the snippets of memory and the finished product to work off, and he has days upon days of time, alone on his ship in the middle of space._

 

* * *

 

There’s moments left before they leave, he thinks. At least if he had interpreted everything right from the others.

He’d taken the time to find a good spot at the back of the base, climbing high up to the battlements and leaning over the railing to gaze at the jungle surrounding him, the ruins of temples further beyond. He takes the battered slip of folded paper out from his jacket. It’s torn a little on one edge, yellowed on its corners.

It still folds out perfectly into the shape of a crane. He admires it for a moment, cupped in his hands, not wanting to let it be blown away by the wind just yet. The morning is still dawning on the horizon. There’s a mountain freshness to the air, there are birds in the trees and he hasn’t heard the sound of them in so long.

He has to wait for a bit for the wind to pick up, feeling as it starts to blow South toward the temples that lie dotted beyond the base. When he thinks the right moment arrives, he raises his hands up a little higher, opens them and lets the strong wind carry the crane away.

A little bit of him is afraid, watching as the crane is blown away by the wind, fluttering in the air- he finds himself clutching at the railings barely a moment later as a particularly strong gust blows past- but the the crane doesn’t fall apart, it gets carried by the wind further and further. He watches until it’s vanished beneath the tall trees in the distance, feels a little bit of his heart ease.

Bodhi finds himself wondering rather at the same time, perhaps if he let himself fall from the railing the wind might carry him as well. It’s an abstract thought, and part of him feels like the wind would, because his body is barely more than skin and bone and bones that are as thin and weak as paper. Perhaps the wind might carry him far, and when it dropped him the sense of freefall would be like how he felt flying a TIE fighter, the nothingness of it, the falling that felt just like flying.

There’s a certain part of him that hasn’t felt the _same_ , not Jedha and the creature Saw Gerrera had interrogated him with. Bor Gullet. Not since he had left Galen behind, on that cold stormy planet in the darkness. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get that part of himself back.

Still, his hands grip the railing too hard, hard enough to bruise, and he doesn’t think he wants to let himself go. Perhaps he’s still too afraid to.

 

* * *

 

_The next time he’s on Eadu, it’s weeks later, and he’s unloading a fresh haul of cargo._

_Inbetween deliveries sometimes he has to wait days, sometimes it's weeks. So he waits until one less-stormy day to look for Galen again, searches for the man and finds him in his drawing room. The man isn’t looking at his blueprints at all but rather somewhere further away, and for a moment Bodhi finds himself hesitating._

_“Galen,” he says, because he’s not sure how else to greet the man, and there’s still awkwardness tripping off his tongue, uncertainty- perhaps he shouldn’t be interrupting the man now, after all._

_But the man has already paused, looked around in his direction, and something in his gaze softens then- almost visibly, and it makes Bodhi relax as well._

_“Welcome back,” Galen says after a moment, looking Bodhi up and down, as if trying to see if anything's changed since the last the man had seen him._

_They make smalltalk for awhile- for a few minutes, Bodhi even forgets why he'd come around at this time of day. Galen is a gracious host as always- even though these technically aren't even his quarters, and Bodhi finds himself with a glass of water talking about his last journey. And then he remembers, and when they fall into a lapse of silence, he quietly lifts a shape of paper from his pocket, unfolds it and places it on the desk in front of Galen._

_Galen blinks for a moment, before he reaches out and touches the crane with the tip of a finger._

_“My mother taught me how to make these,” he tells Bodhi after a moment, fondly. He smiles a little, “Thank you.”_

 

* * *

 

“What’s that?”

Bodhi starts, fingers almost fumbling with a fold before he looks around at Jyn Erso, who has suddenly appeared from somewhere behind him, and is now staring at the paper in his hands with a look of curiousity and some level of odd fixation.

His lips twitch into a weak smile, and looks back down at the square of paper, bringing his hands up to the table and continuing to fold. He hears rather than looks to see as she pulls up a chair, doesn’t sit down but keeps on watching him, her shadow cast over the desk.

A sudden memory strikes him, how Galen had always hidden the final fold behind a hand, so it was a surprise when he revealed the crane. He finds himself copying the same motions, just so at the final moment when he unfolds it, and looks up at her to see- Jyn is wordless, still staring at the palm of his hand.

He places it on the desk between them, almost an offering to her but she only looks at it for a long moment before looking back up to Bodhi.

“Can you make another one?”

And because he does indeed have several pieces of paper, he does. She watches him, eyes fixed on his hands, and he makes his cranes, fold by fold, part by part. Until there are four of them, sitting on the table. She still doesn’t touch them, is still watching, a lost look on her face, a faint smile on her lips- it’s the first smile he’s seen on her face.

“Hey, Jyn! I need you over here!” Andor’s voice calls from the next room, and Jyn’s expression shutters, but she stands up all the same, the ease from her features gone.

Bodhi makes a little shrug, half because he thinks he slightly understands, and half because he can’t help her and he doesn’t really know how to help their conflict. Baze and Chirrut have the right idea, they mostly keep to themselves and keep out of it.

Jyn looks back at him though, before she’s completely out of the room. “My father made those for me, when I was a child.” She’s blunt, her voice is bland, but maybe there’s a hint of something else behind that, something like nostalgia, something shared and some sense of shared understanding, and when she disappears, the door sliding shut with a hiss behind her, he finds himself smiling.

 

* * *

 

_Bodhi doesn’t know how to live for himself, doesn’t know how to do things for himself. Doesn’t know how to free himself. But Galen told him to do this, and so he listens, so he has something that grounds him._

_He gives, and he believes, and perhaps that is the only redeeming factor he has, how he can give all of himself for someone, for something. And this, all of this, he’ll do it for Galen._

_There are dozens of cranes in the room, various shapes and sizes. They litter his quarters, some on the shelves, many on the table. Some are sitting on the floor, and he’s careful not to step over them when he gets back after a day’s work. He touches every one, before he goes._

_There’s old souvenirs, on the shelves. He’s kept them all these years. He doesn’t need those now either. When he gets into his ship, nothing but the clothes on his back and the datastick in his boot, he’s lost. He has a destination, but he’s lost._

_When they’re on Corellia, his partner decides to get dead drunk at a cantina._

_Which, all things considered, is convenient._

_An hour later, he’s off Corellia and headed for a desert planet named Jedha. Imperial cargo ships don’t have trackers on them, and he’s cut off all the communications network from the Empire. He’d done it quickly, so he wouldn’t regret his decision._

_He needs to ditch the cargo ship as soon as he lands, find himself alternate means of transport. That’s what he thinks about; statistics and plans and actions and it’s what he keeps himself thinking, because he can’t start to think of anything else._

_Space is dark, cold when he’s alone. Even with just one other person on board, it had felt less empty. But he touches his chest, and knows that there’s a little slip of paper there, nestled just against his heart._

 

* * *

 

They’re landing, and the noise of the shuttle is loud around them, of all things it's the _seats_ that aren’t what he’s used to, and he’s trying to breathe in and out, trying to calm his uneven heartbeat while the shuttle rocks around him.

He wonders if this is what Galen had wanted, if this is what Galen thought might happen when he sent Bodhi off to do this. He thinks that maybe Galen wanted more for him, just because he knows the kind of man Galen is. The shadow of the paper crane is still against his heart, and oddly he doesn’t feel any emptier with it gone.

He’ll do this, this final thing, to lay Galen at rest. He’ll do all of this for Galen and he’ll rest easy knowing it’s done. And afterwards, perhaps then Bodhi will finally be able to leave this all behind, he’ll finally learn how to live for himself.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> For those who caught the reference, yep, I’m probably going to write a fic someday that involves a snippet about Poe folding cranes, and maybe showing it to the kids on Yavin 4. \o/ It won’t ever die.
> 
> Also: this is, for me, in perhaps the same universe as [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8868964) fic. :’). this was a completely standalone fic, so I’m only including this info at the end, but you can read that fic as well for more of these two.
> 
> My tumblr is [bodhierso](http://bodhierso.tumblr.com) because you cannot tell me Galen wouldn’t have adopted Bodhi if he lived, and we should totally hang out! :’) Thank you for reading!


End file.
